A Vermont Atlas of Every Living Thing Begins

Scientists and Citizen Naturalists Submit Sightings from Nature

Vermonters can start the new year with a resolution to join one of the most ambitious conservation projects the state has ever seen: an inventory of every living thing in Vermont.

The Vermont Atlas of Life  will collect sightings from citizen naturalists and professional biologists and present them online in the form of maps, photos, and even social networking. From mushrooms to maples, moose to microorganisms, everything counts.

"One of the most amazing things about the nature of Vermont is how little we know," said Kent McFarland, senior conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE), which officially launches the project on January 1. "The atlas will generate excitement, discoveries and greater understanding of biodiversity across the state."

Anyone can submit or view Vermont biodiversity data at to the atlas project. 

Decades will pass before the atlas is complete; it may never actually reveal every last species. But it is expected to grow into the most comprehensive accounting of life in Vermont. It appears to be the first attempt to document each and every plant, animal and otherwise in an entire state.

VCE has a track record of enlisting citizens for science, creating atlases of bird, butterfly and bumblebee distribution across Vermont. The new on-line atlas project extends citizen discovery to everything from common plants to obscure lichens, even still undiscovered species such as microscopic animals called "waterbears" or different kinds of snow fleas.

Ultimately the atlas will generate research-grade data to help citizens and scientists discover, track and conserve Vermont's biodiversity. McFarland says Vermonters cannot fully appreciate and conserve what lives in this state without a more comprehensive inventory of life.

"Vermont needs to discover more about what's here and where it is," said McFarland. "This may seem to be an odd analogy, but we should be like big, national box-store chain with an inventory of every product in the warehouse."

The Vermont Atlas of Life web site allows participants to enter the name of species they discover, its exact location and an optional photograph. It also allows experts to corroborate or correct sightings, or even identify a photo of some unknown species.

VCE already runs an online bird inventory project called Vermont eBird and will soon launch a similar butterfly project called Vermont eButterfly. The new Atlas of Vermont Life will accept any species, rare or common, from anyone who joins its online community.

"We often hear about biologists cataloging the biodiversity living on a single tree in some far-flung tropical forest," said McFarland, "but rarely do we investigate the complete diversity here at home."

Bumblebees Do Best Where There Is Less Pavement and More Floral Diversity

Landscapes with large amounts of paved roads and impervious construction have lower numbers of ground-nesting bumblebees, which are important native pollinators, a study from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley shows.

The study suggests that management strategies that reduce the local use of pavement and increase natural habitat within the landscape could improve nesting opportunities for wild bees and help protect food supplies around the word.
The study also suggests that increasing the number of species-rich flowering patches in suburban and urban gardens, farms and restored habitats could provide pathways for bees to forage and improve pollination services over larger areas.
The findings have major implications for global pollinator conservation on a rapidly urbanizing planet.

“We are potentially in a pollinator crisis,” said Shalene Jha, lead author and assistant professor of biology at The University of Texas at Austin. “Honey bees are declining precipitously, and wild bees have also been exhibiting population declines across the globe. Native bees provide critical pollination services for fruit, nut, fiber and forage crops. Understanding how bees move around the landscape can help us both preserve biodiversity and improve crop yields.”

Animal pollination is estimated to be worth over $200 billion in global crop yields.
For the research, published in the journal PNAS, Jha and senior author Claire Kremen, a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, studied a native California bumblebee, Bombus vosnesenskii, in habitats across exurban areas, farms and nature reserves.

In addition to finding that pavement negatively affects the bees, the scientists discovered that:

• Bees will move longer distances to find patches of flowers that are rich in species; it’s not floral density that determines how far a bumblebee will fly, but floral diversity.
• Bees will also forage further away from their home nest if the surrounding landscape is less heterogeneous. “In some ways, it’s a bet-hedging strategy,” said Jha. “If the landscape is composed of consistently dense flowering patches, bees take a risk and forage farther afield to find species-rich patches.”

"In combination with earlier work showing that bumblebees have become rare in agricultural landscapes, our study suggests that farmers could promote these valuable pollinators by diversifying crop types and by planting cover crops and flowering hedgerows to enhance floral diversity," said Kremen.

We are potentially in a pollinator crisis...Understanding how bees move around the landscape can help us both preserve biodiversity and improve crop yields.
Though it may seem obvious that pavement and ground nesting don’t mix, Jha said that our understanding of the effects of pavement and urban growth on native bees has been largely anecdotal.

“Using genetic tools, we can now estimate the number of colonies in an area,” said Jha, who began this work as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. “This is helping us better understand how wild pollinators live and move across large, diverse landscapes.”

Bumblebees nest in the ground, and each colony contains a queen and a force of workers. As with honeybees, all of the bumblebee workers are sisters who spend some of their time flying around searching for flowers from which to collect pollen and nectar to feed the larvae back in the hive.

Unlike honeybees, which are not native, bumblebees do not make harvestable honey. They do, however, provide important pollination services to plants.
“Bumblebees are among the most effective native pollinators,” said Jha. “They are large and can carry a lot of pollen. They also vibrate or ‘buzz’ flowers with their bodies and thus are excellent at extracting pollen and moving it from plant to plant.”

To study the bumblebees, Jha did not scour the landscape for nests in the ground, which has proved in the past to be very difficult, especially over large areas. Instead, she analyzed the genetic relatedness of bees foraging in the landscape.
If bees collected in an area were genetically identified as sisters, they came from the same colony. Unrelated bees came from different colonies. Jha used this information, plus the bees’ locations, to estimate the number of bee colonies in an area and determine how far afield the individual bees were foraging.

Source: University of Texas at Austin press release

Zack Woods Pond Protected (a loon nesting site)

The following note is from Kate Wanner, a project manager for the Trust for Public Land, about the protection of Zack Woods Pond in Hyde Park where loons have nested for the past 20 years or so.  Kate navigated the land acquisition process, not an easy task for lakeshore property.  Sue Premo, a VLRP volunteer, initiated the long-term protection of this special place and perservered in making sure the right people were brought into the process.   I assisted Sue as part of the Friends of Zack Woods Pond.   Happy Holidays. 
Eric Hanson, VLRP coordinator

From Kate Wanner, Trust for Public Land

"I wanted to share the good news that we just closed on the last piece of Zack Woods, protecting a total of 393 acres in Hyde Park & Wolcott, VT as an addition to Green River Reservoir State Park. I want to thank everyone for their help with this project, especially Sue Premo and the Friends of Zack Woods for their tireless work to conserve this property, educate the users who were inadvertently harming the natural resources, and improve the water quality and visitor experience through site improvements and outreach.

The Friends of Green River Reservoir were also essential to the conservation of this land, and will be an important partner to the State in the future management of the property, protection of its natural resources, and education of its users.

Morrisville Water & Light, the Judkins and the Harris family deserve our sincere appreciation for their patience in the long process, their regular clean-up of the refuse dumped on the properties, and their willingness to work with us to permanently conserve their land for the public to enjoy.

Lastly, a big thank you to Kate Willard and many other staff at the State of Vermont for working with us these past three years to secure the federal funding and three sources of state funding, and deal with title, survey and appraisal issues, all in the midst of staff shortages, budget shortfalls and being shuffled around to different offices after losing their state office in Waterbury to Hurricane Irene.

As we previously discussed, we would like to celebrate the conservation of Zack Woods with an event out on the property in the spring. We'll be in touch with more details in a few months.

These precious loon chicks, photographed on Zack Woods Pond by Phil Etter, appreciate all you do and wish you a happy holidays!"

A mixed report card for Canada’s species at risk

December 12th 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA). Under SARA, species become candidates for listing following status assessment by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). The committee met in Ottawa, Ontario, November 25-30, and assessed 42 Canadian wildlife species as at risk. These assessments bring the total number of wildlife species recognized by COSEWIC as at risk to 668. One result that emerged from this meeting is that effective protection under SARA can help reduce the risk of extinction for Canadian wildlife.

Read more at COSEWIC...